Which one do you pick? Odds are, unless you’ve eaten at the first restaurant, you’re going to buy from the second pizza place. Here’s why…

Pizza joint makes a generally boasting statement that doesn’t communicate much. Essentially they think they’re the best but give you no reason for justifying that messaging. Now the second one does something brilliant, it tells you specifically what you will get: hot pizza in 30 minutes or less.

By the way the second company is one you probably heard of…Domino’s Pizza.

That’s the power of developing a value proposition. You create marketing messages that are powerful and clear to your marketplace. So how do you do it?

Florida based MarketingExperiments.com developed a systematic way to find to your company’s value proposition. In fact, they run $20 million dollars of experiments a year and most of their findings are that companies with strong value propositions tend to fare better than ones that don’t.

So let’s learn how to find your value proposition. Let’s go back to the pizza example and run with that.

First thing we want to find is five to ten things our pizza place offers of value, let’s say they are:

hand tossed dough

recipes from Naples, Italy

103 different toppings

local delivery

centrally located restaurant

Now, we need to see what has appeal (I want this) and exclusivity (I can only get it from you) to your customers. Let’s rate them on a scale from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest) based on appeal and exclusivity.

Hand tossed dough – Appeal = 3 Exclusivity = 3

Recipes from Naples, Italy – Appeal = 4.5 Exclusivity = 5

103 different toppings – Appeal = 4 Exclusivity = 4.5

Local Delivery – Appeal = 3.5 Exclusivity = 3

Centrally Located – 4 Exclusivity = 3.5

So looking at our results, the top two pieces of value were recipes from Naples and 103 different toppings. Knowing our market they love exotic sounding pizza with lots of toppings. In terms of exclusivity, no one else claims to have recipes from Naples (specific) and 103 different topics (even more specific).

Now we can’t just make claims that sound generic and cause eyes to roll. The next step is to add evidence to our claims. Here’s how:

Recipes from Naples, Italy – we can list the recipes and their origins from Naples, if you have family from there even better. These are fairly easy to prove to be true.

103 toppings – how do you prove this? Real simple…just list the toppings on your menus. The number is specific and has the appearance of being counted up.

OK, now we’re going to craft a value proposition statement by using our top two pieces of value. It could look something like this:

(because) Napoli pizza features authentic recipes from Naples with 103 choices of toppings.

What this tells customers is clear and credible. You know the recipes are authentic and there’s a ton of choices for toppings. Think about this for a moment, doesn’t this sound more convincing than “the best pizza in town?”

Now, the best way to know if this will resonate with customers is to test it out in your advertising. Try using different pieces of value to see what gets the best response. Ultimately, if you go through this exercise you’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of your competition in terms of marketing.

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